A taxonomic name service must engage and support the taxonomic community

The service mission of uBio is focused on developing enabling technologies that bring the needs of natural science information providers within the same informatics framework as the curators of taxonomic name information. We believe that such a common infrastructure will be mutually beneficial provided that the intellectual work of contributors is preserved as it provides value to users of that work.

Our development efforts are therefore focused on accounting for all transactions in and out of a network service interface. If a student types "Great White Shark" into a linked library catalog system then any contributor who provided additional name and classification information that might further enable that search should be able to retrieve an accounting of that usage.

We are testing an accountability model within our network service that links all name and classification usage to the contributors of that knowledge.

This diagram illustrates a usage scenario utilizing the Taxonomic Name Server.

A patron at a library terminal (the Requestor) types in a search term into an online interface to a library catalog or database hosted on a library system (the Client)

The library system (Client) utilizes the network interface to call the Taxonomic Name Server (TNS). The call to the name server logs both client and (at the discretion of the client) Requestor data (IP address)

The TNS interprets the request returns the requested data and logs the unique identifiers of all data sent.

These identifiers link all data to a history record identifying all contributors to the record.

These data are processed to provide a full accounting to contributors. This accounting is an important means to both demonstrate the importance and impact this information can have on data retrieval but to also provide a quantifiable measure of relevance to those who in turn fund taxonomic work.